We’ve been playing Blades in the Dark for a couple sessions. I’m the GM and we did a session of investigation (since my players seized on an entirely different faction’s current goal) and then a score and a downtime. And things are going well. But one question popped up today as I was planning out some of my future sessions. How do you do “boss fights” in Blades in the Dark? Sure, they’ll always be scuffles and basic throwdowns against various backalley thugs and legbreakers, but how do you do a fight against a master swordsman? A towering bodyguard Hull? Bazo Baz, who my least fighty player has taken as his rival?
I love boss fights. I love unusual enemies with styles and gimmicks and I love a good fight scene, one that’s brutal and back-and-forth and people grab things and throw things and all that. How do YOU do serious fight scenes in your game?
Core Blades suggests doing such things with a series of interlocking clocks, with varying numbers of field based on how difficult you want it to be.
We had a major fight scene in an underground temple. Lucky for the players they brought along a troop of fine elite mercenaries which they got from the the Hive as a payment for a former job. Rule 1: Bring a lot of competent friends to a fight. So we were able to focus on some cinematic fight scene involving PCs and bosses, having the mercs as background actions and source of complications / good stuff from crits. I think I used clocks to track the health of the bosses.
This is a good situation to read up on the rules for position and especially for effect, which lets you simulate the difficulty of fighting stronger, more powerful or durable foes.
Rebecca W That’s part of the problem. Even if you add the “NPC threat levels “indication on p. 167, the rules for position and effect are just not precise enough, or more precisely, they lack granularity : There are just three “levels” of NPCs in combat : unskilled, skilled, master.
The abstraction of clocks is OK but if you add several of them, as Brandon suggests, the game gets way too crunchy and then you could as well reintroduce Hit Points, it would be easier to manage.
Also how to use Armor for NPCs ? Abstracted with Tier ? But what would the Skovland refugees have as good armor as the Bluecoats ? And would NPCs armor only serve once or twice as PC’s armor? And so on.
To conclude, for me, combat is the one place where BitD rules are lacking in completeness and/or precision.
A B A clock in combat IS hit points, as far as I’m concerned. Ben Morgan ran a scene where my PC fought the local badass, and she had a six wedge clock representing her toughness, which included armor. A clock for a specific enemy is no more or less abstract than HP.
Remember, clocks can also be used in different manners, and tied to each other. You could have one clock operating as a “hit counter” and another telling you how often harm is dispensed. Make the harm clock tied to the hit clock: once the hit clock is full, the players don’t have to resist harm anymore.
Brandon Perkins Thanks, Brandon, for the explanation. But it is… unclear. What does ‘the players don’t have to resist harm anymore’ mean ? In BitD, the players never ‘have’ to resist harm ; they can resist harm if they choose and have enough stress to burn. I am sorry to say that, written as it is, your ‘two tied clocks solution’ is perfectly unintelligible.
A B Can you give me/us some specific examples of the fights you want to model using the system, as well as the specific mechanics you’re trying to simulate? I’d like to try to give you a concrete answer that directly addresses some of your concerns, as it seems like a lot of the answers thus far haven’t been working for you. How about giving me one example of a conflict you feel isn’t adequately simulated in the rules as you understand them, and we’ll see how we can model it?